If a student is assigned to write a paper involving Shakespeare's Hamlet,

• An Alta-Vista search on "Hamlet" produces 204,000 web pages containing that word.
• A Yahoo search reveals 91 sites devoted to "Hamlet".

In both instances, the searches retrieve a wide range of "Hamlets" including many that are quite irrelevant to the assigned topic.

At one level, this is not very different from the classic customer-support questions that have characterized library reference desks for decades. Unlike library collections, however, Internet information is poorly organized. Both the relevant and irrelevant material is intermingled in ways that can overwhelm novices.

Quite simply, novices face the problems of too much information, presented in ways that make it difficult to find the valuable items in a sea of repetitive or irrelevant junk.

Some relevant new skills include:

• Sophisticated searching using Boolean structures and carefully chosen terms
• Search engines based on new criteria
• Data warehouses and data mining
• Use of relevance searching
• Metacontent, or semantic webs to organize information.
• Intelligent software agents (knowbots, softbots, and infobots)
• Personal databases to organize research notes.